Why' Because it kills 90 per cent of the victims. Denise Grady reports

Traditional healers say their grandmothers knew of a bleeding disease similar to the epidemic of haemorrhagic fever that has killed 244 of the 266 people who contracted it. The grandmothers even had a treatment for the sickness, the healers told Dr Boris I. Pavlin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the remedy has been lost. The old disease was called kifumbe (pronounced key-FOOM-bay), the word in the Kikongo language for murder ... | Read..

There may not be a restaurant at the end of the Universe, but there seems to be a bar in our Milky Way,’’ — that’s how Leo Blitz, an astronomer from Berkeley (then at Maryland), concluded his talk at a meeting of American astronomers 15 years ago. He and his collaborators had analysed the motion of stars near the centre of the Milky Way and found hints of irregularities in their movements ... | Read..

From a humble beginning of guesswork to launching of a sophisticated space vehicle like Discovery, observational astronomy has come a long way, said Prof. U.R. Rao, former chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while delivering a lecture on ‘The Ascent of Astronomy and Indian Space Programme’ ... | Read..

Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none, she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips... | Read..